


Flood Waters

by nyctanthes



Series: Prompt Ficlets [9]
Category: Fast Color (2019)
Genre: 3 Sentence Ficathon, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-07
Updated: 2021-02-07
Packaged: 2021-03-15 00:47:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 422
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29180496
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nyctanthes/pseuds/nyctanthes
Summary: Technically, it wasn't a summer storm.
Series: Prompt Ficlets [9]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1249265
Comments: 2
Kudos: 2





	Flood Waters

Technically, it wasn’t a summer storm. It felt like summer; but then again, for years, since before the rains stopped every day had felt like summer - January through July through December. A bone dry, scorching, suck the air from her lungs day followed by a cool night. Almost as dry, a suggestion of moisture on the tongue, the palms, between the toes that in the beginning got her hopes up, but never amounted to anything. 

They lived in the desert but everywhere was a version of the same. The fire swept mountains a decade bare of snow. The seaside beaches shorn of grass, swamped by saltwater, wind beaten cottages and many windowed, cubist mansions left for questing sharks and minnows, chatter feeting plovers and squat, surly seagulls. She was the furthest thing from sentimental within a seven hundred mile radius. Yet when she was lonely, when she was exhausted from grandchild rearing, the quotidian drudgery of their survival - procuring and scavenging water, food, medicine, bandages, rope, string, nails, wood, knives and hatchets and wrenches and saws, gas, glass and plexiglass, solar panels, soap, cloth, shoes, clothes, a neverending multitude of parts for house and truck; scheming and cleaning, sweet Jesus the cleaning; magic hiding, walking that no net tightrope of containing themselves while not stifling their potential because one day, some day - even she couldn’t stop herself. From lingering over photographs of monsoons in faraway lands that saw nothing but rain, reminiscing like an old fool about the afternoon she and Ellis were too busy necking on the bleachers to notice the dark clouds rolling in, the white tinged, cornflower day turning to mercury dusk. Oh, how she cursed the water that soaked through her dress, a bedraggled red flag dripping on her mother’s worn smooth, spick-and-span kitchen floor. 

It might as well have happened to someone else.

So when Ruth - her difficult, brilliant, troublesome, awesome, once destructive, always striving, beautiful daughter - did what she will do, must do, was born to do and drenched the whole sky in the colors, infinitely more brilliant, more alive than those insipid, almost forgotten rainbows. Brought a storm down on their hot heads, minute after minute, she assumed she was dreaming but it didn’t end. She felt not a drop of sorrow, only the faintest regret for what was to come, for her. 

She strode into the jail with a sure step, the lightest of hearts, knowing this was just the beginning for her dearest ones, this could be a new beginning for everyone. 

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the 2021 3 Sentence Ficathon in response to the prompt: Any Fandom, Any Character: The joy of a summer storm.


End file.
